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Isentia - Keeping ahead of the curve

Research First - The secret to happiness … isn’t
so secret

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Isentia

Keeping ahead of the curve

The
news cycle as we’ve known it no longer exists. Issues take off and change
course within a matter of minutes. For New Zealand’s leading communicators this
creates just as many opportunities as challenges.

It has been exhilarating to see the events
that have raced away over the past 12 months in New Zealand media, since I
arrived as Isentia’s NZ Country Manager. Among many, we’ve seen a rollercoaster
election, the Prime Minister welcomes a baby, and supermarkets ban single-use
plastic bags.

But what have these stories meant for New
Zealand and each of us who live here? What impact have they had on the
organisations and political institutions who were part of every twist and turn?

These are questions that Isentia are uniquely
able to answer. It is this front-row seat to the ever-changing and wildly
entertaining media show coupled with our passion for helping clients that make
Isentia such an amazing place to work.

It has been constantly gratifying to see how
New Zealand organisations are leading the way in their approach to media
intelligence.

The culture in New Zealand is innovative and
forward-thinking. Organisations embrace the new technology that allows them to
navigate modern media challenges. They also have a passion for understanding
the insights that media data can tell them.

Being
a part of the conversation

Organisations need to make and implement
important decisions quicker than ever before. Looking back to the plastic bag issue,
it’s been less than a year since Countdown led the way as they announced their
single-use plastic bag phase-out.

Now we see the Ardern government is already
working towards removing them across the nation. It’s crucial that companies
stay on top of the media trends, so they can maintain authority in their given
field, to leverage opportunities as Countdown did so well, or prevent issues
from escalating into crises.

A
trusted advisor

Across the past 12 months, it has been a
major highlight to see the relationships we have continued to develop with our
New Zealand clients. Our approach is to understand our client’s strategies and
work hand-in-hand with them to help achieve their objectives via our tailored
solutions.

Clients trust Isentia to be an extra set of
eyes and ears for them. If an incident occurs, we have a plan of action ready
to go. As technology continues to evolve, we are optimising our ability to
connect the most important pieces of media intelligence for our clients in the
shortest time possible.

Speed
versus accuracy

Accuracy has traditionally been more
important to our clients than speed. However we’re finding the speed of the
current media cycle is changing that equation. Accuracy is still key, but speed
is just as important now. The stakes are higher, and we are up for the
challenge.

To answer these current and future needs of
our clients, some of the most exciting work at Isentia continues to be in the
area of artificial intelligence. We have transformed from the company that told
you what happened yesterday to what is happening right now, and we are becoming
the company that helps you to predict what will happen next.

There has never been a more exciting time in
my 12 years at Isentia. Originally published on M+AD!
here.

Russ HorellCountry Manager, NZ

Research First

The secret to happiness … isn’t
so secret

It’s not often you find a social scientist
who is unequivocal about what their research means. Instead, what most of us do
is line up our disclaimers (‘this study suggests…’) and talk about the
limitations of our work (‘more research is clearly needed’).

This happens so often that Harry Truman
famously asked for a one-handed economist because he was tired of his economic
advisors qualifying their recommendations with “on the other hand…”.

Truman would have liked Richard Waldinger.
Waldinger is the current director of The Harvard Study of Development, and a
man who has no time for equivocation. He writes “the clearest message that we
get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and
healthier. Period”.

The previous director of the study, George
Valliant, was even more succinct. He was adamant the results of the study could
be captured in five words: “Happiness is love, full stop”. Elsewhere he gave
himself the luxury of using fourteen-words, noting “the only thing that really
matters in life are your relationships to other people”.

“the
only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people”
– George Valliant, The Harvard Study of Development

Sure, what goes on inside your head matters
(as you’d expect a psychologist to say) but you are much more than what Errol Morris
called the “buzzings in the ball of electric jelly inside [your] skull”. Your
brain exists inside a physical body, which then lives in a social world. You
were born to move and, as part of a social species, born to connect.

Of course, it makes no sense to separate
these dimensions in this way. We arrived at being human through the interplay
of those three things. We have the brains we have because our bodies move the
way they do and because we are part of a social species. Still, being able to
shift between these three perspectives will help you better understand why you
make worse decisions when you’re hungry or feeling lonely, and why having
stronger social ties will keep you healthier and help you live longer.

You may have already worked out where this
going: The evidence from the social sciences couldn’t be clearer: To find more
fulfillment in your life, keep learning; remain active; and stay connected.

The
evidence from the social sciences couldn’t be clearer: To find more fulfillment
in your life, keep learning; remain active; and stay connected.

__________________

Notes:

The Truman quote is all over the internet
but I can’t find any published evidence that he ever actually said it. The
closest I can find is the reference “As quoted in: To provide for amendment of
the Bretton Woods agreements act, U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1976” from
https://izquotes.com/quote/352704.

The Harvard Study of Development’s might be
the longest continuous study of adult life ever. It has tracked over 720 men
from Boston since 1939 and is still collecting data from the surviving
participants. Its website is http://www.adultdevelopmentstudy.org/. There are
many publications on that site worth reading, and the Study even has its own
Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Study).

The five word summary by George Vaillant
comes from Scott Stossel’s “What Makes Us Happy: Revisited”, The Atlantic, May
2013.

The fourteen word version comes from Joshua
Shenk’s What Makes Us Happy”, The Atlantic, June 2009.

To be fair, the idea that close
relationships are the key to a happy life is well-known in social psychology,
as is the link to better health outcomes. For instance, have a look at David
Myers (1999) “Close Relationships and Quality of Life” in Well-Being:
Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, edited by Daniel Kahneman et al., Russell
Sage Foundation.

The Errol Morris quote is from his “is
there such a thing as truth” in The Boston Review, April 30 2018